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21st century Marxists need to return to Marx’s ecological critique

By Simon Butler

March 23, 2013 -- Green Left Weekly -- Do oil spills make good economic sense? A witness called by Canadian
firm Enbridge Inc.— which wants approval to build a $6.5 billion pipeline
linking Alberta’s tar sands with the Pacific coast — told a recent hearing in British Columbia (BC) that the answer is yes.

He said oil spills could benefit the economy, giving business new
opportunities to make money cleaning it up. He told Fishers Union
representatives that an oil spill in BC might indeed kill the local
fishing industry, but their lost income would be replaced by
compensation payouts and new career prospects, such as working for oil
cleanup crews.

Upon reading this, some readers might protest: “That’s just not fair!
How come British Columbian communities reap all the economic gains of a
potential oil spill disaster, when we have to live in relative safety?”

It’s easy to laugh at this kind of thinking, to write it off as a desperate ploy by a greedy oil company.

The argument assumes it could be more useful to allow an oil spill
than prevent it from happening. It assumes the ecological, social,
health and emotional costs of such a disaster can be calculated in
financial terms and neatly balanced off with a cash payment.

It suggests there is no fundamental economic difference between
activity that maintains or destroys human lives and natural ecosystems.
It says the short-term financial returns from causing pollution count
for more than maintaining the integrity of the biosphere for the
indefinite future. It accepts that the ruination of the natural world
helps provide generous new opportunities to expand capital.

But before we laugh too hard, we should recognise that the world’s
big corporations make all of these assumptions on a day-to-day basis.
The argument put to the British Columbian hearing was cruder than most,
but it is entirely consistent with the inner logic, and everyday
practice, of the capitalist system.

British-German economist E.F. Schumacher once said: “The strength of
the idea of private enterprise lies in its terrifying simplicity. It
suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect –
profits.”

Marx’s ecology

Famous for their analysis of capitalism and call for social
revolution, Karl Marx and his co-thinker Frederick Engels are far less
known for their ecological thinking, which held that capitalism
inevitably tears apart the natural conditions that sustain life.

They argued capitalism’s exploitation of working people, and the
unsustainable exploitation of nature, were linked and part of the same
process. In 1844, Engels remarked:
“To make the Earth an object of huckstering — the Earth which is our
one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step
towards making oneself an object of huckstering.”

Marx had a coherent approach to ecology, which emphasised the
historically conditioned, co-evolution of nature and human society.
Marx’s two most important ecological insights were “the treadmill of
production” and “the metabolic rift”. The treadmill of production refers
to capital’s impulse to unlimited expansion, its relentless drive to
increase profits, regardless of the ecosphere’s natural limits.

In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Nature is a circular
system where everything is recycled. This is the opposite of
capitalism’s linear, treadmill economy, which overloads natural systems
with ever-growing amounts of waste products: waste gases into the sky,
waste pollutants into water, and waste chemicals and toxins into the
soil.

The metabolic rift refers to Marx’s theory that capitalist production
for profit creates a sharp break in the crucial two-way relationship —
the metabolism — between nature and human society. Marx’s concept of
metabolism incorporates the material and energetic exchanges between
human society and the natural world, which is mediated by the process of
human labour.

Marx arrived at this conclusion from his research into how industrial
agriculture tended to reduce fertility, depriving the soil and the
workers of nourishment and sustenance. But he also understood the
concept of the metabolic rift on a global scale, as colonies in the
global South had their natural resources and soil fertility plundered to
support Western capitalist development — an imperialist project that
continues today.

Healing this rift and building a truly sustainable society was a
central goal in Marx's vision of a democratic socialist future. In Capital,
he said: “Freedom ... can only consist in this, that socialised
[humans], the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with
nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control
rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it
with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and
appropriate for their human nature.”

Engels said capitalism helped destroy the natural
world because “in relation to nature, as to society, the present mode
of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the
most tangible result”.

In the early years of the Russian revolution, Bolshevik leader
Nikolai Bukharin drew on Marx’s arguments about the link between human
society and nature. He concluded:
“If human society is not adapted to its environment, it is not meant
for this world; all its culture will inevitably pass away; society
itself will be reduced to dust.”

Restore Marx’s ecological critique

In a passage near the end of the Communist Manifesto Marx
and Engels discuss what makes communists stand out from other political
parties and groups. First, revolutionaries always fight alongside
working people for their immediate aims. But the manifesto goes on to say that “in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement”.

To truly fulfil this dual role today, 21st century Marxists have to
learn from the mistakes of 20th century Marxists who mostly failed to
recognise how fundamental ecology was to Marx’s thought and tended to
downplay ecological issues. It means Marxists must be part of movements
to stop climate change and other ecological breakdowns, which pose a
not-so-long-term threat to life as we know it.

It is with good reason that French Marxist Michael Lowy has said the “ecological question ... poses the major challenge
to a renewal of Marxist thought”. Typically, Marxists in the 20th
century, even of the anti-Stalinist variety, held to a “productivist”
vision of change, whereby increasing the level of the productive forces
inherited from capitalism was considered the path to social progress.

Technology was wrongly assumed to be class-neutral, rather than
historically and socially determined. The experience of the Soviet
Union, with its dreadful record of environmental vandalism, heralded
what John Bellamy Foster calls “the grand tragedy that befell Marxist
ecological thinking after Marx”. Together with its repressive,
undemocratic regime, the Soviet system’s crimes against ecology amounted
to a rejection of a core element in Marx’s vision of social
transformation.

This history makes the concept of ecosocialism doubly important. Ian Angus has said that
“ecosocialism begins with a critique of its two parents, ecology and
Marxism”. It seeks to combine the best insights of ecology, which says
human actions can undermine the basis of life, with Marxism’s critique
of capitalism — a system based on the dual exploitation of labour and
nature.

Ecosocialism is not a new political party or theory. It’s a movement
that seeks, as Angus puts it, to “make the greens redder and the reds
greener”. It holds, in Foster’s words,
that “there can be no true ecological revolution that is not socialist;
no true socialist revolution that is not ecological”. It recognises the
truth of Barry Commoner’s conclusion about the ecological crisis: “To
make peace with the planet, we must make peace among the peoples within
it.” It knows peace is a dream as long as there are such things as lower
classes, oppressed minorities and billionaire tycoons.

But restoring Marx’s ecological critique must go beyond sometimes
quoting a few lines from the classics, or insisting on capitalism’s role
in driving climate change. Angus says the real challenge is a creative one:
“A key task for ecosocialists everywhere is to take the beginning
points that ecosocialism offers today, and to build on them using the
method of Marxism, the best scientific work of our time, and the lessons
we learn in struggles for change. Then we must apply our new
understanding in a wide variety of places and circumstances.

“This is hard to do, because it requires us to think, to
understand our situations and respond appropriately and creatively, not
just repeat the same old slogans. Only if we do that can ecosocialism
contribute effectively to saving the Earth."

Marx and Engels famously urged the world's workers to unite because
they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.
Capitalism’s drive toward ecological catastrophe adds a further vital
dimension to this vision of human liberation. If Marxism is to live up
to its own maxim as a theory to not merely interpret the world but to change it,
then it must include strong ecological theory and practice. The stakes
are high. We still have a world to win — but we also have a world to
lose.